Justine Howe is the Faculty Director of the Flora Stone Mather Center for Women and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at CWRU. Professor Howe specializes in contemporary Islam with an ethnographic focus on Muslim communities in the United States. She joined the Department of Religious Studies in Fall 2013 and is a core faculty member in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. She holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Northwestern University and an MA in Anthropology and Sociology of Religion from the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Professor Howe is the author of two books on Islam in the United States. Her recent book, Maryam Jameelah and the Global Muslim Imagination (Princeton 2026), explores the intersection of American postwar religious politics and the Islamic Revival through the life and work of Maryam Jameelah, an American Jewish convert to Islam who became a leading global Muslim intellectual.
Her first book, Suburban Islam (Oxford University Press 2018), explores why local, diffuse communities, or generative “third spaces,” are crucial for tracking the possibilities and constraints of contemporary Muslim American identity. Focusing on suburban Chicago, the book demonstrates how third space communities have transformed leisure practices, such as football games and nature walks, into practices that its members understand as enactments of Islamic piety. She is also the editor of the Routledge Handbook of Islam and Gender (2020). The volume features 32 original essays related to various dimensions of gender and sexuality in global Muslim contexts.
Professor Howe has published several articles and book chapters related to her research in venues such as Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Journal of Quranic Studies, Journal of Muslim Philanthropy and Civil Society and the Routledge Handbook of Early Islam.
Professor Howe’s work has received numerous grants and fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy of Religion, and the American Association of University Women, and the Expanding Horizons Initiative at CWRU.
At CWRU, she teaches a wide range of courses in religious studies, including Introducing Islam, Anthropology of Religion, Islam, Gender and Women, and religion and technology.